There Is an Opportunity to Challenge Clinton From the Left, But It Is on Education, Not Economics

Logo of the National Education Association

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​Originally published in the Mischiefs of Faction blog.

By Jonathan M. Ladd

American political parties are coalitions of interest groups (or "policy demanders"). Parties usually select presidential nominees who are acceptable to all the major groups in that party's coalition. Assuming she decides to run, Hillary Clinton is the early favorite for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. The press has also already starting speculating about possible rivals, including perhaps Vice President Joe Biden, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, or even Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley. Do any of these rivals have a chance, or is a Clinton nomination a forgone conclusion?

Political science suggests that it is not just the political skills of these challengers that will matter, but also if any major Democratic Party faction chooses to support them. Factions will make choices based on whether the challengers have electioneering skills, but also whether the faction is disgruntled enough with the Democratic Party establishment's policies to back an insurgent. Currently, the major organized Democratic Party constituency that is most disgruntled with the policies of the Obama administration is public school teachers unions. Other factions, like industrial and service unions, are organized and not happy with everything the Obama administration has done, but nowhere near as alienated as the teachers unions. Others, like leftist economic policy activists (e.g., Occupy Wall Street) are nowhere near as large or organized.

Teachers unions are a core Democratic constituency. In my own analysis of General Social Survey data, I find that, in presidential elections since 1988, 71% of teachers union members have voted Democratic, compared to 51% in the rest of the population. [1] But even more consequential is the representation of teachers unions among Democratic activists and the party's interest group coalition. The "The 2012 Convention Delegate Study" conducted by Kimberly Conger, Rosalyn Cooperman, John Green, Richard Herrera, Kerem Ozan Kalkan, Geoffrey Layman, and Gregory Shufeldt found that 16.4% of all Democratic Party National Convention delegates were teachers union members. [2]

Yet the current Democratic administration has pursued an education policy that teachers unions oppose, often in harsh terms. [3] The 2001 No Child Left Behind law requires that by 2014 every public school will be declared a failing school unless 100% of its students are proficient in reading and math. This is an almost impossible standard to meet. Pretty much everyone agrees that some modification of the law would be helpful. But gridlock between congressional Republicans and the Obama administration prevents legislation on almost any topic from enactment, including updates to NCLB. This stalemate has given the Obama administration a lot of power to shape education policy by giving states waivers from unrealistic NCLB requirements. In exchange for waivers, the administration insists that states evaluate teachers in part based on student test scores and implement the Common Core curriculum. Several states, including California, Oklahoma, Vermont, and Washington, currently do not have waivers because they have refused to adopt these policies. In addition, as part of the 2009 Economic Recovery Act, the administration awarded $4.35 billion in educational grants to public schools across the country, but they gave priority in the grant competition to school systems that evaluated teachers based on student test scores, increased the number of charter schools (which almost always have non-unionized teachers) and implemented the Common Core.

Evaluating teachers based on students test scores has long been opposed by teachers unions. And charter schools are an existential threat to teachers unions. Imagine a Democratic administration demanding that Ford set up parallel non-unionized factories to replace its current unionized ones. Whether you agree with their views or not, you can understand why unions have opposed Obama's policies. Finally, unions were further angered this June when Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Democratic Rep George Miller (CA) publicly supported a Los Angeles judge's ruling that California's tenure laws were unconstitutional.

The two largest national teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, have been increasingly vocal in opposing the Obama administration's policies. In July, the NEA, the largest and historically more moderate of the two, passed a resolution at its national convention calling for Education Secretary Arne Duncan's resignation. It also elected Lily Eskelsen Garcia as its new president, who promised a more aggressive stance against the types of education reforms the Obama administration supports. In her speech at the convention, she railed against "stupid testing," the "phony" evaluations systems based in it, and said that "I’ll be damned if I will sit quietly and play nice and say diplomatic things about something that has corrupted the profession I love." In a recent AP interview, she complained about "toxicity of this testing insanity."

At its own July convention, the AFT also called on Duncan to resign if he doesn't follow an "improvement plan" that includes abandoning the administration's No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top  "test and punish" teacher accountability systems. The resolution that the AFT passed went on to say:

[Duncan] has aligned with those who have undermined public education, with those who have attacked educators who dedicate their lives to working with children and with those who have worked to divide parents and teachers... He has failed to bring parents, students, teachers and community members together to improve the quality of public education for all children, and he has promoted misguided and ineffective policies on deprofessionalization, privatization and test obsession.

At the convention, AFT President Randi Weingarten said,

Make no mistake about it: There’s a lot of hurt that has been expressed from the floor – the feeling that the Secretary of Education doesn’t walk in the shoes of public educators or provide the support and resources necessary to ensure all children have a high quality public education.
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This intra-Democratic Party fight has been brewing beneath the surface for Obama's whole presidency. A much more minor, but illustrative, example was Matt Damon speaking at a "Save Our Schools" rally against Obama's policies in 2011. The Obama administration asked Damon to meet with Secretary Duncan before the rally so that they could try to win Damon over, but Damon refused to meet with anyone from the administration.

If it appears that a Clinton administration would continue Obama's education policies, and a different candidate embraces the teachers' critique of that policy, the challenger could give Clinton a serious fight. Clinton will likely still win anyway, because there are no signs that any other major party faction is poised to oppose her. But teachers unions could give a challenger campaign volunteers and a political organization in many states across the country, which could be translated into votes and delegates.

For now, potential rivals for the nomination have differentiated themselves by being more liberal than Clinton on economic issues like regulating Wall Street and income inequality generally. But we will know if one of them is serious if he or she also gets to Clinton's left on education and makes that a centerpiece of the campaign. This is because ultimately an insurgent candidate must not just be personally skilled to have some success in the nomination process. He or she needs support from one or more major organized factions in the party. The teachers unions look like the Democratic interest group most predisposed to join an insurgency. There is an opportunity to challenge Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton from the left. But that opportunity is mainly in education policy because that is where there are interest groups to back the challenge.

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[1] I pool votes for president in the 1988 through 2012 elections in order to get the sample size of teachers union members large enough to draw meaningful conclusions. I measure teacher union membership by combining the Census Occupation Code (1980 format) variable ("occ80") with the union membership variable ("union"). The same pattern holds in party identification as in vote choice. 57% of teachers union members identify as Democrats compared to 46% in the rest of the population.

[2] Data provided by investigators.

[3] For a more detailed and theoretically rich description of changing party positions on education policy over time, I strongly recommend Christina Wolbrecht and Michael T. Hartney's (2014) article, "Ideas about Interests": Explaining the Changing Partisan Politics of Education," in Perspectives on Politics.